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University of Minnesota Press launches Minnesota Archive Editions

In partnership with Amazon.com, Google, and BookMobile, the new initiative will bring more than 1,000 titles back into print.

Nov 20, 2008

The University of Minnesota Press announced today an ambitious program, Minnesota Archive Editions, that will establish Minnesota as the first university press to return into print virtually every book published since its founding in 1925. “We’ve already made more than 600 of our out-of-print titles available again,” stated Marketing Director Emily Hamilton, “and within the next six months we will have every title back in print except those for which we don’t have full rights or which are not suitable for digital printing.”

Minnesota Archive Editions is the result of an innovative four-way partnership of the Press; Minneapolis-based company BookMobile; BookSurge, an Amazon.com company; and Google Books. “The seed of the idea,” said Press Director Douglas Armato, “came when we heard from Google that they were getting a high number of hits on our out-of-print books. Then, in discussions with Amazon and BookSurge, we found visionary partners that saw the potential in returning a scholarly publisher’s full backlist to print and had the resources and infrastructure to help us make that happen. Finally, our relationship with BookMobile allows us to make the books readily available to all our customers, including libraries and bookstores.”

Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible to scholars, students, researchers, and general readers. Rich with historical and cultural value, these works are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The books offered through Minnesota Archive Editions are produced in limited quantities according to customer demand and are available for order through Amazon.com and through the Press’s distributor, the Chicago Distribution Center, which will forward orders to BookMobile for printing and fulfillment. The books will be full-text searchable through both Amazon’s Search Inside the Book program and Google’s Google Book Search program.

“We’re thrilled to partner with the University of Minnesota Press to help make their entire backlist available in one-offs and short runs. It’s a very cool way to take advantage of high-quality digital printing,” said BookMobile President Don Leeper.

“This has been a massive, but also really exciting project,” stated Hamilton. “It involved going back almost a century to research rights, working to locate living authors, assembling bibliographic data, and assessing each book physically and editorially. We started the project last December, and in just one year, we’ll have doubled the number of titles we have in print.” Adds Armato, “Finding partners in the commercial sector was crucial to this initiative. We never could have done it on our own.”

For more information please contact Heather Skinner, Publicist, at presspr@umn.edu or 612-301-1932.

About the University of Minnesota Press: Founded in 1925, the University of Minnesota Press is widely considered one of the top ten U.S. university presses and is best known as the publisher of groundbreaking work in social and cultural thought, critical theory, race and ethnic studies, urbanism, feminist criticism, and media studies. The Press is among the most active publishers of translations of significant works of European and Latin American thought and scholarship. Minnesota also publishes a diverse list of works on the cultural and natural heritage of the state and the upper Midwest region. The Test Division of the Press publishes highly regarded personality assessment instruments, including the MMPI-2 and MMPI-A. For more information visit www.upress.umn.edu.